I think support for non free is a major reason for people to chose Ubuntu over Debian, specially with cheaper laptops that come with non standard chipsets. Of course Ubuntu also comes with stronger marketing and people generally (sadly) prefer having a corporation behind software than a charitable organisation.
This decision only affects non-free firmware blobs. Proprietary drivers like Nvidia or Broadcom still have to be installed separately. So I don't think it'll help much in that regard.
There are numerous corporations paying contributors or employees to work on Debian, and supporting Debian in other ways, Canonical for example, or the Debian partners and Debian consultants and most of the LTS team comes from Freexian.
Level up from Ubuntu Pro to Debian Pro Max subscription.
Perhaps widely used software should have a toll-free number to call to address faulty product concerns as if food stocked in a grocery store and the consumer's concern is resolved down to the firmware's sourceware line per line with unit testing before and after snapshots given in a receipt the consumer watchdog will be able to use to resolve as a last resort should the consumer fail to make progress with the vendor.
A bad precedent in my opinion - look at qualcomm blobs on mobile devices. You have no choice and this undermines all mobile security in affected devices.
You already have no choice. While I agree that it's sending a sad message of defeat after such a long time, you either consciously buy "free hardware" anyways, so this doesn't affect you, or you're more of the pragmatic kind and would've installed the non-free blobs anyways after the Installer finished.
Anyone could have easily just downloaded the nonfree iso. However, I think it's so very important that we can simply say "Just go install Debian" to anyone just looking for a rock solid OS.
There are a few open WiFi firmware projects for ancient chips/standards, one of them is based on reverse engineering, two are from vendors releasing source and the last one is an academic project.
I think this news is more perception than anything else, Debian already allowed non-free, but now is including that in the installer, aligning both, which seems to make sense if only enabled manually after asking the user
But in general seems like an unnecessary identity crises, catering for the wrong user base. Most people can't use Debian stable for daily desktop. In my opinion most of the Debian user base is enterprise and this move does no improvement but causes perception questions. Maybe they will start to consider other options NixOS, Guix, CoreOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora
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